Gladinet Cloud Desktop

I regularly use several free cloud storage services to store and backup my files and documents online like Dropbox, Windows Skydrive and Google Docs. Dropbox has this amazing feature where I can just drag and drop my files to my Dropbox folder and it will magically sync. For Skydrive though, I have to upload 5 individual files a time using a browser which is both time consuming and quite a hassle.

This is where an application like Gladinet Cloud Desktop comes in handy. Gladinet lets you connect your PC to your favourite cloud storage such as Google Docs, Windows Skydrive and Box.net and mount those services as a virtual network drive on your computer.

After installing Gladinet Cloud Desktop, you can see all your online files on your PC as if they were on a local drive. You can mount as many cloud storage as you like at once and you can drag and drop files on that drive just like you normally do with Windows Explorer. Gladinet will automatically sync those files to your cloud storage.

The Gladinet Cloud Desktop starter edition is free but you can only copy and paste one thousand (1000) files at one time to your cloud storage which should not be a problem because there's no limit how many time you can copy and paste your files. Compared to Dropbox, Windows Skydrive provides 25GB of free online storage so using Gladinet makes file syncing so much easier. The only downside is I can only store files no larger than 50MB on Windows Skydrive whereas Dropbox or Sugarsync doesn't impose any limit on individual file sizes.

Some of the more popular and free cloud storage supported by Gladinet are Windows Skydrive, Box.net and Google Docs (no love for Dropbox or Sugarsync yet). Gladinet Cloud Desktop is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Server 2003 and 2008 version.